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Happy Thanksgiving! I had a wonderful dinner with friends and then the traditional post-dinner Thanksgiving movie. This Thanksgiving the film du jour was I’m Not There (Kendall Theater). I LOVED it. Brilliant. Totally brilliant. Director Todd Haynes has transformed Bob Dylan into a contemporary Citizen Kane. Six actors play the elusive Dylan, with Cate Blanchett turning in a stunning performance (my favorite moment is her soliloquy in the limo. She turns to face the camera and nails Dylan’s penetrating gaze and then almost imperceptible slides from a mysterious Dylan stare into a perfect Mona Lisa smile). You don’t have to know a lot about Dylan to appreciate the film (one of the women I was with didn’t know anything about him), but if you have read his autobiography and seen the Pennebaker and Scorsese documentaries, and more importantly, listened to his music and followed his musical development, you will have a much richer experience. Numerous little things about Dylan are alluded to, which in this carnivalesque, hypnotic, trippy ride of a film, without prior knowledge it would not be apparent what was at stake. For example, in one scene it is suggested that the true identity of the young, black, Woody Guthrie pretender Dylan, might be a boy from Brookline called Edelstein – Dylan’s real last name was Zimmerman. Another example, an older Dylan (Richard Gere), hiding out in riddle town, has a dog named Henry that he loses and then finds. Although I am not exactly sure what Haynes was getting at with the dog, Henry certainly brought to mind some of Dylan’s more recent songs, “Love Henry” from World Gone Wrong, and the controversy over whether or not Dylan lifted lines from the poetry of Henry Timrod (2006 album, “Modern Times”). I definitely recommend this film!